1.6-million-year-old mammoth DNA uncovers lineage we never knew existed – By Jackson Ryan (CNET) / Feb 17 2021
The breakthrough research reveals an entirely new lineage of mammoth, previously unknown to science.
When Love Dalén first began studying ancient DNA as a Ph.D. student back in 2002, one of his colleagues suggested working on lemmings, the tiny arctic rodents and ’90s video game icons. “Everyone is doing mammoths,” she told Dalén, “it’s very competitive.” The hulking, ancient proboscideans have captured the imagination of the public and scientists for years — and when an opportunity arose for Dalén to study the famous woolly mammoth, he couldn’t resist. He wanted to understand why the creatures went extinct.
But on Wednesday, Dalén and 21 other scientists looked at the other end of the woolly mammoth’s timeline: its origin. In a history-making paper, published in the journal Nature, the team announce their retrieval of DNA from mammoth specimens over a million years old — demolishing the record for the oldest ancient DNA ever sequenced by almost 900,000 years.
“It’s an amazing paper,” says Sally Wasef, an ancient DNA researcher at Griffith University in Australia. She isn’t affiliated with the research.
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